You know, we all just sort of wake up every day
and basically accept the default settings of
society. Right. The things we don't even question.
Exactly. You get a job. You find a place to live.
You keep your finances entirely separate from
your neighbors. Yeah. Maybe you give them a polite
nod over the fence if you happen to be checking
the mail at the exact same time. Right. We treat
these unspoken rules of modern life like they're,
I don't know, natural laws, like gravity. But
they're really not. No, they aren't. And that's
what we're getting into today. Welcome to today's
Deep Dive, crafted just for you, the insanely
curious learner. We are looking at a massive
Wikipedia article on intentional communities.
It's a fascinating source. It really explores
what happens when a group of people looks at
that default setup and decides to just, you know,
wipe the hard drive. Yeah, they look at the isolation,
the economic pressure, the nuclear family structure,
and they say, no, we're going to build our own
reality from scratch. is the ultimate act of
opting out. You aren't just changing your personal
habits, right? You are fundamentally redesigning
the architecture of how you live. How you share
resources, how you govern behavior, all of it.
So our mission today is to figure out why humans
consistently try to opt out of mainstream society
to build these utopian mini societies. We're
going to look at the history, the rules they
make, the incredible successes. And the really
catastrophic failures, too. OK, let's unpack
this. Well, to understand what we're actually
dealing with, we have to establish a clear definition
from the source. Right. What makes it an intentional
community and not just a neighborhood? So an
intentional community is a voluntary planned
residential community designed specifically to
foster high social cohesion. OK. The sociologist
W .J. Metcalf frames it brilliantly in the article.
He defines it as five or more people drawn from
more than one family who voluntarily come together
to fix perceived social problems. Five or more
people. Got it. Yeah. And they adopt a consciously
devised alternative to mainstream life. But the
key ingredient he identifies is a we consciousness.
I love that phrase. Let's hover on that we consciousness
for a second. It's not just a shared zip code.
Not at all. It's a psychological shift, right?
Where the members see themselves as a continuing
group that is separate from society. And usually
they feel they're structurally superior to the
society they just left behind. Yeah, that psychological
boundary is crucial. Whether the community is
built on deeply shared spiritual beliefs, political
ideologies, or maybe just the practical desire
to share a single lawnmower and split childcare.
Which honestly sounds great sometimes. Right.
But that boundary is what creates the cohesion.
I think when most of us hear intentional community,
our minds immediately jump to something really
recent like a 1960s hippie commune in California.
Oh, for sure. Or modern eco village covered in
solar panels. Exactly. But looking at the source,
this drive to build a custom operating system
for society is actually an ancient human instinct.
Yeah, this is not a modern trend by any means.
The article notes that ashrams in India. which
functioned as highly structured intentional spiritual
communities, date back to around 1500 BCE. Wow,
1500 BCE. Yeah. And Buddhist monasteries emerged
around 500 BCE, built entirely around a planned,
cohesive social structure operating completely
parallel to mainstream society. And it wasn't
just in the East. Even Pythagoras, like the triangle
guy, founded an intellectual, vegetarian, intentional
community in southern Italy around 525 BCE. Right.
He literally pulled people out of mainstream
Greek society to live under strict shared philosophical
rules. It's wild. The urge to gather your people,
draw a line in the sand and say we're doing things
differently over here is just baked into human
history. Which brings us to the mechanics of
that custom op - system. Mainstream life comes
pre -installed with certain apps and bugs, right?
Individualism, consumerism, isolated housing,
yeah. So when a group decides to uninstall that
and write their own code, they have to decide
what the new rules are going to be. But I actually
have to challenge one of the examples the source
categorizes under the structural definition.
Oh, which one? The historical data includes some
early 1900s company towns, like corporate owned
mining towns. Ah, yes. To me, a corporate town
where the company owns your house and the local
store feels like the exact opposite of a voluntary
utopian commune. How does a corporate town fit
into a utopian ideal? Well, if we connect this
to the bigger picture. You have to look at the
structural mechanism rather than the vibe. The
vibe, right. A company town is a planned, socially
cohesive residential community. It has a central
authority explicitly designing the rules of daily
life, the housing, and the economy to fix a perceived
problem. But the problem wasn't a lack of spiritual
enlightenment. Exactly. For them, the problem
was an unstable, unpredictable workforce. So
they provided comfortable housing and strict
social rules to manufacture a stable, sober workforce.
Structurally, the mechanism of a planned society
is identical, even if the ideology uploaded into
it is purely about corporate productivity. OK,
that actually makes perfect sense. The tool itself
is the planned environment, and the intent dictates
the outcome. Precisely. But acknowledging that...
human instinct to build custom societies brings
up a massive logistical nightmare. Oh, absolutely.
The governance. Right. If you rip up the traditional
social contract, how do you actually make decisions?
How do you govern 50 or 100 people who have deliberately
rejected standard societal norms without it devolving
into absolute payoffs? Here's where it gets really
interesting. Yeah, the data in the source. completely
flips the stereotype of a lawless free -for -all.
It really does. A massive 64 % of intentional
communities govern themselves democratically.
Wow. They rely heavily on complex consensus decision
-making models or direct voting to run their
daily lives. On the flip side, Only 9 % operate
under authoritarian or strict hierarchical structures.
So the vast majority are deeply committed to
letting the group dynamically decide its own
fate. Yes. But when we talk about governance
and shared resources, we have to tackle the c
-word. Yeah. Commune, it carries immense cultural
baggage. It usually brings up images of leftist
politics or counterculture movements. But structurally,
a commune is a highly specific, intense subcategory
of an intentional community. Right. The Fellowship
for Intentional Community, the FIC, uses a very
strict technical metric for this. Yes. They define
a commune specifically as a group that practices
100 % income and resource sharing. Everything
goes in the pot. Exactly. And Dr. Bill Metcalf
outlines three core principles that must be present.
First... the group matters more than the nuclear
family unit. That's a huge shift right there.
Huge. Second, they maintain a collective household.
And third, they operate from a common purse.
I mean, put yourself in that position for a moment.
You work a job, and your entire paycheck goes
into the middle of the table. Every cent. You
want to buy a new winter coat or take a trip,
and the group decides how those collective funds
get spent. We see this exact model in the 1960s
hippie communes like California. Oh, in San Francisco,
right. 1967. Right. They were fiercely egalitarian
and completely rejected formal social hierarchies.
They wanted living arrangements, scale to human
dimensions, rejecting industrialization. And
crucially, they were consciously anti -bureaucratic.
Right. They didn't want rules, managers, or committees.
But let me push back on that specific combination.
You take 20 or 30 people, you declare their bond
to the group, supersedes their bond to their
nuclear family, you put all their money into
one single bank account, and then you completely
remove all formal bureaucracy, management, and
hierarchy. Doesn't replacing your nuclear family
with a common purse group of 20 people just sound
like a recipe for intense drama? It absolutely
is, and sociological research bears that out
perfectly. I bet. Benjamin Zablocki studied these
exact dynamics and found that the fault lines
in these communities were incredibly predictable.
Because when you remove formal hierarchy, you
don't actually remove power dynamics. No, you
just make them invisible. Decision making becomes
this exhausting daily negotiation of social capital
and charisma. The tyranny of structuralistness.
Precisely. Zablocki noted massive tensions between
the original family of founding members, who
held all the unspoken informal power, and the
new arrivals. Which makes sense. And furthermore,
in communities that experimented with open relationships
or free love, sexual jealousy ripped groups apart.
The theory is that your primary emotional bond
is to the collective. but human psychology really
struggles to maintain that level of emotional
collectivity. It is incredibly draining. So that
structural fragility really explains why so many
of these utopian experiments collide spectacularly
with reality. Let's examine what happens when
these custom -built societies face the pressures
of the real world on a global scale. We can start
with a fascinating failure that reveals just
how vulnerable a microeconomy can be. Okay, the
Raleighina State in County Clare, Ireland. This
was 1831. Yes. A wealthy landlord named John
Vandalour decides to turn his massive estate
into a commune. He brings in an English socialist,
Edward Thomas Craig, to design the architecture
of this new society. And they set up some really
strict rules. 12 -hour work days in the summer.
They completely banned alcohol, tobacco, snuff,
and gambling. And most radically, they eliminated
traditional money. Right. They operated entirely
on internal credit notes. Members were paid in
these notes, which could only be spent at the
commune's internal shop. It's a brilliant mechanical
way to ensure that the economic value generated
by the workers never leaves the community. The
wealth circulates internally, creating a closed
loop economy. And mechanically, it worked beautifully.
For two years, the social experiment prospered.
Violence in the area dropped. Members were highly
productive. 29 new members voluntarily joined
the original group. But here is the fatal slaw
in their design. It's like spending days building
an intricate, multi -story house of cards only
for the guy who owns the table to sneeze on it.
That is a perfect analogy. Because John Vandeler
still owned the actual land. Yes. In 1833, Vandeler
gambled away his entire fortune, including the
Ralehane estate. Unbelievable. The community
collapsed entirely because the founder gambled
away his fortune. It didn't fail because the
credit notes didn't work or because the members
lost faith in the weak consciousness. No, it
collapsed instantly because the guy who owned
the underlying physical asset lost it in a card
game. The members literally had to write a declaration
acknowledging they had experienced two years
of absolute peace and prosperity and then they
had to pack their bags and leave. It perfectly
illustrates the danger of building a utopian
structure on top of an un -utopian foundation.
Absolutely. but moving from the tragic to the
highly controversial. We also see how the mechanics
of an intentional community can be deployed for
strict political and cultural isolation. Right.
Let's look at Orania in South Africa, founded
in 1991. Just looking mutually at the facts from
the source, Orania is an Afrikaner -only town.
Yes. The explicit goal is to create an isolated
stronghold for the Afrikaner minority group to
preserve their language and culture. And they
achieve this through extreme structural self
-sufficiency. They have their own local government
and crucially their own internal banking system
and local currency, the aura. Wow, their own
currency. Yes. By strictly enforcing a policy
where they only employ other Africaners within
the community and utilize this internal currency,
they completely sequester their microeconomy
from the broader South African state. And the
data shows this closed loop model is aggressively
expanding. Between 2018 and 2022, they experienced
a booming 55 % population growth, reaching 2
,500 residents. Then, if we look at a completely
different ideological spectrum operating under
similar pressures of state friction, we have
the Tolstoyan communities in 1920s Russia. Right.
These were intentional communities attempting
to live out the pacifist, agrarian, Christian
anarchist ideals. of Leo Tolstoy. And following
the 1917 revolutions, these agrarian communes
initially flourished. But by the late 1920s,
the Soviet state began its massive push for agricultural
collectivization. Collectivization required absolute
state control over the grain supply and the labor
force. Which meant that a self -sustaining independent
group of pacifist farmers operating their own
microeconomy was no longer just a quirky alternative
lifestyle. No, it was an existential threat to
the totalitarian state monopoly on resources
and ideology. So the Soviet government aggressively
targeted them. Communes like the Life and Labor
Commune were forced to literally dismantle their
lives and relocate to the brutal environment
of Siberia just to avoid being liquidated by
the state. And even that geographic isolation
wasn't enough. The state pursued them, putting
several Tolstoyan leaders on trial and sending
them into the Gulag prison camp system. Just
incredibly harsh. What's fascinating here is
The mechanism of the intentional community is
completely neutral. Right. It's just a tool.
Exactly. It is just a framework for high social
cohesion. In the case of Orania, the founders
are utilizing that framework as a fortress of
absolute isolation. In the case of the Tolstoyans,
the traditional government recognized that exact
same framework as a profound threat that had
to be crushed to maintain state dominance. But
lest you think that opting out always ends in
a gambling collapse or being targeted by the
government, the historical record is full of
quiet, enduring successes. Definitely. Like Twin
Oaks in the United States. Established in 1967,
it has survived for well over 50 years, which
is a remarkably rare feat for a non -religious
commune. And in Scotland, the Feinhorn Foundation,
founded in 1962, is not only thriving with over
400 residents today, But it operates so efficiently
that its wind turbines actually export electricity
back to the national grid. That's amazing. And
in Australia, the more and more cooperative community
has managed to stay completely off the power
grid on a mountain in Victoria since 1974. These
successes generally point to a profound pragmatism.
They managed to balance their utopian ideals
with the rigid demands of agriculture, energy
production, and conflict resolution. So we have
covered ancient Greece, 19th century Ireland,
South Africa, and Soviet Russia. We've been all
over the map. Literally. You might be sitting
there thinking this phenomenon is entirely about
rural isolation, escaping to the woods, going
off the grid, building a cabin. But there is
a massive modern shift toward applying these
custom operating systems to urban environments.
So what does this all mean for you, the listener,
navigating a modern city today? Well, the demographic
data completely shatters the back to the land
stereotype. A survey by the Fellowship for Intentional
Community reveal that while 54 % of these groups
are indeed rural, a massive 28 % are entirely
urban. That is a huge chunk. And another 10 %
maintain both urban and rural footprints. We
see this vividly with urban kibitzim in Israel.
The traditional image of a kibitz is a harsh
agricultural commune out in the desert, you know,
making the land bloom. Right. But today there
are dozens of urban communes thriving directly
inside dense Israeli cities. They're moving away
from agriculture. driven mostly by younger demographics
right yeah graduates of youth movements who have
realized that the most pressing social problems
aren't in the desert they are in the metropolis
yeah they emphasize local education intense social
involvement and resource sharing right in the
middle of the urban grid another incredibly powerful
application of this urban model is the Simon
community in London Oh, this is a great example.
It's a social cooperation model designed explicitly
to address the crisis of urban homelessness.
And it functions very differently from a traditional
charity. It isn't a soup kitchen where volunteers
serve meals for two hours and then retreat to
their separate secure apartments. No, the structural
foundation of the Simon community is shared living.
Homeless individuals and full -time volunteers
actually live and work together in the same residence.
They operate mildly nomadic street cafes to distribute
food and build relationships across the city.
But the core mechanism is that they are using
the psychological architecture of an intentional
community that consciousness to dissolve the
barrier between the helper and the helped. It
directly addresses the profound isolation that
accompanies homelessness by enforcing a village
-level sense of belonging. Exactly. Which brings
up a critical question about the trajectory of
our modern default settings. Let's hear it. If
modern society is making us so isolated, so financially
stressed and so lonely that we literally have
to invent urban communes and schedule colliving
situations just to feel a baseline sense of village
life, Are intentional communities actually an
alternative lifestyle, or are they just a desperate
attempt to get back to baseline human needs that
modern cities have structurally designed out
of existence? I completely agree with that perspective.
That is the ultimate synthesis of this phenomenon.
Intentional communities are increasingly stepping
out of the realm of radical fringe utopias. When
the default housing market forces us into isolated
boxes and the default economy individualizes
every single financial risk you face, forming
a cooperative household or an urban eco -village
isn't a retreat from reality. It's a highly rational
strategy. Yes. You are securing social bonds,
sharing heavy capital expenses like vehicles
and appliances, and regenerating the mutual support
networks that humans relied on for thousands
of years. We have covered massive ground today.
We started with Pythagoras refusing meat and
enforcing a vegetarian utopia in 525 BCE. We
examined how an Irish microeconomy collapsed
over a gambling landlord in the 1830s. We looked
at the extreme political friction of these groups
in Russia and South Africa, and we ended up with
modern urbanites sharing resources to combat
the crushing fragmentation and loneliness of
city life. The unbroken thread through all of
these eras is the human desire to connect, to
share risk, and to boldly attempt to design a
better way of living together, regardless of
the odds of failure. It's the ultimate proof
that society's rules are written in pencil, not
ink. And I want to leave you, the listener, with
one final original thought to mull over as you
go about the rest of your day. The source material
really defines these communities by the rules
they choose to make rather than the ones they
inherited. Exactly. So if you have the power
to start an intentional community in your own
neighborhood tomorrow. What is the one default
rule of modern society you would completely eliminate?
That's a great question. Would you ban money?
Would you ban fences? Think about what your own
custom social OS would look like and who you
would invite to share it. Thank you so much for
joining us on this personal audio journey. Stay
curious.